If a game is budgeted at 30 million they make a profit if they sell a game for $9 when they sell 3.4 million copies. They usually sell games at $49.99 though. Which means they only need to sell about 613k copies. Also, I doubt only but the biggest budgets are going to be 30 million(the average Capcom budget).
You're assuming they pocket the full $49.99, but that's not true. Going off of this
source, one can estimate that Nintendo, playing the role of Developer, Publisher, AND Console Owner, makes $34 off of a $60 game, or $28.33 off of a $50 game. If you're not the platform owner, and you're just the Developer+Publisher, then you're looking at $27 off a $60 title, or $22.5 off of $50.
If we're looking at a $30 million budget for both development AND marketing, then we're looking at a game that Nintendo needs to sell in excess of 882k units to break even at $60 MSRP, or 1.33 million units at $50 MSRP.
Nintendo has
gone on record that they're hoping that their software can sell 2 million units worldwide, and that the games that outperform expectations make up for the games that fail in the market.
If we imagine that we are looking at a hypothetical "average" 2-million seller from Nintendo priced at $60, and we apply the same assumptions and estimates as above, then said hypothetical game might have a combined development and marketing budget of $68 million.
This sounds like a lot, but it's well known that many AAA titles have cost way more than $100 million to make when all things are accounted for (GTA V is a famous example, estimates hitting the $260 million mark). Also, one rule of thumb I've heard is to imagine that the marketing budget for a game equals the development budget... so whatever you spent to make it, you gotta spend again to sell it.
Given that thinking, almost all the games listed
here likely cost more to make than the sort of game that Nintendo is aiming to budget for.
Uhhh... I'm pretty sure no one was discussing this, but once I started looking up the numbers this brought to mind I couldn't stop myself! >_< Forgive me!